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"Media shows us a selective reality, we need to put it in the global big picture," say authors of 'Factfulness'

"Media shows us a selective reality, we need to put it in the global big picture," say authors of 'Factfulness'

TNN | May 27, 2018, 00:10 IST

Anna Rosling Ronnlund (lefte) and Ola Rosling

Bill Gates has called ‘Factfulness’ one of the best books he’s read and a “fitting final word from a brilliant man”. The man in question is Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician-statistician who passed away last year. But not before finishing his passion project, which seeks to show that contrary to what people think, life is getting better. Neelam Raaj spoke to his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna, who collaborated with him on the book, on why we need to overcome our ‘negativity’ instinctThe book shows that most people believe that things are bad and getting worse in the world. Do you think this worldview will be shared in India where living standards have substantially improved?

As India is a middle-income country and has a much faster growth rate than many Western countries, it would most likely give you a better picture of the world in general. But that is something we have not yet tested.

One of the 13 fact questions you asked in your global survey related to extreme poverty. But only 7% knew that it had halved in the last 20 years. How important is a fact-based worldview in an age of fake news?

A fact-based worldview is important all the time and everywhere so that we can make good decisions. When reporting about a problem increases, it’s easy to mistake it for an increase of the problem. That is also true of fake news. It has probably always existed but a good thing today is that it is being more frequently reported.

Is the media to blame for people having a negative view of the world?

Media always reports on the extraordinary, it shows the exceptions, and it should. Unfortunately, our brains have a hard time remembering that the events reported in the news are the exceptions. Even if the news is reported correctly, it shows a very selective sample of reality. And the news is rarely put in a global historical context. For instance, if there was a terrorist attack in India today, would the news include a few sentences putting the event in a historical context? Would it tell you if terrorism is an increasing or decreasing problem in India, compared to the past? How is India’s terrorism compared to neighbouring countries and what about the global perspective? In Factfulness, we give news consumers rules of thumb to control their dramatic instincts and remember to put the news into a big global picture.

The kind of ignorance we are disclosing is unrelated to Trump. We got the same terrible results in our tests before Trump got elected. When we find a scapegoat, like with Trump, and start blaming everything on him, there’s a great risk that we stop seeing things clearly. People have always had a hard time seeing global proportions and historical trends. Instead of blaming individuals, we should try to understand the system that enables the individual to do bad things so that we can avoid it in the future.

Hans worked to clear misconceptions about the world. He also swallowed a sword on stage to show people that the seemingly impossible can be possible. Do you plan to carry on his work, if not his sword-swallowing skills?

We will definitely carry on that work, and the book is one of the stepping stones in that direction. Unfortunately, neither of us swallow swords. However, we do know a female sword swallower who is ready to perform with us, if needed.

Anna, can you tell us about your Dollar Street project which photographed people in 50 countries and the key takeaway from it?

In statistics, it can be hard to imagine what life is like for people behind the numbers. In Dollar Street, we imagine the world as a street with the poorest to the left and the richest to the right. Everybody else lives somewhere in between. Now, we have visited 300+ homes in more than 50 countries and in each home, we collect information: photos of household objects like toilet, bed, stove, toothbrush and video snippets of everyday activities such as brushing teeth, doing laundry, etc. We also ask each home about their incomes, how many people live there, what they work with, etc. Then, we add these homes to the street, where the houses neighbouring each other are on the same income level, but might be from different countries. The user can look at the world by choosing photo categories like beds, shoes and toys. Country stereotypes simply fall apart as people on the same income level tend to arrange their homes in similar ways, independent of culture, religion or country.

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